General Question

What legal responsibilities does a new landlord have?

The duplex we have been living in for 5 years was just sold.
The sale closed a week ago. Our lease is still good until October 1st.
However, we have not seen or heard from this new landlady at all.
We don’t have any contact information for her either.

The bathroom pipes over our kitchen are leaking (not horribly yet) and we need to get ahold of her asap.

We have called our old landlord to see if he can give us the real estate agents name, and perhaps they can give us her contact info. We have her name, but that’s. it.

Is there some legal liability that she has to contact us within a certain time?

22 Answers

Your new landlord has the same responsibilities as your old landlord but landlord tenant law varies from state to state, even city to city. You should probably contact your state Attorney General’s office for specific information about the law where you live.

They may also be able to tell you who to call or how to find out how to contact your new landlord. The information you need may be in the public records somewhere, like the Register of Deeds office
.

If she fails to respond to normal attempts at communication, I suggest at the very least DON’T PAY YOUR RENT! Sooner or later she’ll figure it out and contact you. Make sure if you do this that you can document on paper the many ways you’ve attempted to contact her so she won’t try to charge you late fees.

Since this post, I have spoken to the Real Estate agent. She gave me the number for the new landlady. I called the number and it said that it was no longer in service. The Real Estate agent said that might happen, and that if it did to try a text. Now that doesn’t even make any sense, but we tried. It turned out to be a landline. So we are with nothing at all for now.

and @snowberry we couldn’t EVEN pay the rent if we wanted to, unless she contacts us. We wouldn’t have a clue where to send it.

As @snowberry suggests, if you’re paying rent, you have some form of contact information.

You can also try contacting local government offices, such as recorder of deeds, assessor and tax collection. If the building was ever listed for sale, newspaper archives would tell you the listing agent.

Bathroom pipes leaking over the kitchen is a serious infraction of the building code. You need to start keeping a written record of when the problem started and your efforts to get it corrected. Did the leak start after the building was sold?

Reverse trace the landline. The area code and prefix will give you an idea of the area. If it was recently disconnected, there will still be record.

The real estate agent can make contact if she’s motivated. Did you tell here that the bathroom pipes were leaking into your kitchen? That should be a red flag, since if there is any evidence they were leaking prior to close, it could queer the whole deal. Call the agent again and make like turds are falling from the ceiling. Then when you get the new owner, do the whole “I was so worried that it would turn into a huge problem and I’d get blamed for not reporting it soon enough!” thing.

We did reverse trace, the number is in Texas (we are in Illinois). From what we have found she has an address listed there and in Illinois.
I don’t know that the real estate agent can do anything more than we did. She gave us the number that she has been using to contact her during the sale.

As for the pipes, I don’t know what kind of quack she hired for the house inspection. Today was the first ever we saw evidence of the leak. However, the large ceiling tile made of particle board (?) is soaked and ready to fall in. The wood up there is not in great shape from it.

It’s bizarre that the new landlord has not provided a way for you to pay them !!
I’ll guess that they either have some screwball plan to let the property deteriorate to the point that everyone moves out (and redevelop?) or are astonishingly bad business people.

Well, thankfully the leak has not continued. It happened when we had a clogged toilet and had to plunge it quite a bit. Obviously there is still a problem. But right now it’s not impacting our living.
Our previous landlord claimed that the new landlord planned on living in the front unit while renting to us in the back unit. We know that she put the electricity in her name up there. So she has done something. Our previous landlord also said that he thought she planned on moving in this week.
We are hoping that she will show up soon.

UPDATE: We got a note in our mailbox today from the new landlord. she says she is moving in next week. She says to just put the rent check in her mailbox up front.
(remember this is a duplex, she is not moving into OUR home)

She gave us her phone number. but she tells us even in the note that it’s not working properly and to text her. It will probably just come back to us that it’s a landline again.

We are going to write her a note back and put it in her mailbox up front about the leak and such.
I feel like we are playing the old children’s game of “telephone” here. Or maybe even the 25,000 dollar pyramid.

UPDATE: The landlady and her boyfriend showed up yesterday. They were up front in their unit quite awhile doing some renovating. Her boyfriend seems to be somewhat of a handyman, which is a great bonus.

They both seem nice and we feel comfortable with them.
Apparently the problem with the phone number was that someone along the way misread/typed one of the numbers wrong. We now have the correct number.

We paid rent directly to her yesterday and got a receipt.

As for the plumbing, the leak started up again today. The landlady’s boyfriend came over to look at it and called a plumber who is coming out tomorrow morning.